Colorado Gun Dealer Sentenced to Prison for Continuing Sales After Federal License Revocation
Last week, a man from Aurora was given two and a half years in federal jail for selling guns illegally. He said that some of these sales were because of mistakes made by his employees and pressure from his wife.
Stephen Taconi, 70, who runs A-TAC Gear Guns Uniforms, LLC, was given 30 months in prison on Wednesday. Police from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) Denver Division looked into Taconi and said he sold guns (including “ghost guns” and unregistered parts) outside of Colorado without a license and often without doing background checks.
The ATF found that three of Taconi’s guns were sold to people who had been convicted of crimes.
Court papers and online public records show that Taconi registered his business in Colorado in 2015, the same year that the ATF gave him a license to sell guns. Taconi ran A-TAC from his own home.
In 2018, the ATF found out that Taconi was selling guns at a gun show in Wisconsin. Agents there told him about rules that said people with a federal firearms license could only sell guns at gun shows in the same state where their approved business is located.
Taconi admitted that he had broken the rule and signed a letter of warning. It was called “Warning Notice of Gun Show Operations in Violation of Federal Law.”
After four months, ATF officers went to Taconi’s business and looked at his records and saw that he had ignored the warning. “A-TAC had sold fifty-six firearms to fifty-four different out-of-state residents through twenty-seven out-of-state gun shows,” the check showed. “Forty of the sales occurred after Mr. Taconi received his warning letter.”
The home inspection also found that Taconi did not do background checks on 110 of the deals. The ATF found that three of those sales were to people who have been guilty of a crime and are not allowed to own guns. There were three sales to criminals after the Wisconsin warning.
In 2019, the ATF took away Taconi’s license to sell guns. Two years later, a federal judge looked at the case again and agreed with the revocation. The judge also agreed to a $24,486 fine for the three violations of the background check rules that led to the sales to criminals.
In a statement written by the judge, Taconi said that the lack of background checks was due to “miscommunications” by his staff. It wasn’t the only time Taconi tried to avoid taking blame.
U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote, “He gave different reasons and excuses for his company’s violations.” “…he said he wasn’t sure if the ATF agent was a “real” ATF agent when she approached him at the gun show in Racine, Wisconsin. He also said that his wife was pushing him to make sales in this way because she didn’t think some gun sales rules were important.
“Concerning his failure to perform background checks…Mr. Taconi testified, ‘I don’t understand why you do that’ and stated that it was ‘an added expense.'”
There was evidence that Taconi then didn’t care that he lost his gun license, just like he didn’t care about the warning letter.
Gun sellers and other witnesses said Taconi sold guns and gun parts at gun shows for two and a half years. It was in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. At those shows, Taconi sometimes asked other dealers to check his past for him.
Some of the guns for sale were also not marked, which meant they were not registered.
Then, between late 2022 and early 2023, ATF bought four guns and silencers from Taconi’s house while pretending to be someone else. After getting a search order, it was carried out in February 2023. From the home business, agents took 33 guns, 217 silencers, ammo, and different gun parts.
In a press release about Taconi’s sentencing, ATF Assistant Special Agent in Charge Chris Ashbridge said, “Despite multiple warnings, Taconi chose to intentionally and repeatedly sell illegal firearms and manufacture ghost guns, which is what we call Privately Made Firearms,” across the country, especially along the US-Mexico border. “His actions significantly increased the risk of violent gun crime, putting our families and communities in great danger.”
Taconi was also told to pay back the $185,900 he got from the federal government in emergency business relief funds during the pandemic, even though his business wasn’t licensed to operate at the time. In one loan proposal (an EIDL), Taconi lied about A-TAC’s income, saying it would bring in $33 million in 2020 and spend $11 million.